A taste of autumn.

Although we are deep in the swing of Christmas preparations, I couldn't let these pictures go unnoticed. We just planted 3 new trees in our yard this fall, which pretty much doubled the number of trees we have. And the 3 we had aren't very healthy and don't produce the leaves you'd expect to see on the ground in the fall. So we go through each autumn without picking up a rake in our own yard. No, I'm not complaining; it's completely awesome. But we were eager to find some leaves to rake with the kids, somewhat of a Fall Bucket List thing. Luckily, my grandma's yard collects a deep covering of leaves each year, so we stopped down there a few times this fall to help rake. The kids had a blast! Neither child was very helpful with the actual raking, but they were very good at helping put the leaves in the bag. Scratch that - Brooke was good at the helping part. Joe was good at the "spreading the leaves back around the yard" part. Thankfully, we were moving faster than him, so he didn't hurt us too much in the end. The smiles on their faces while we were there were huge; they asked to go back to help rake so many times in the following weeks.

This one's so quintessentially Autumn. I adore it.